Scale Up Your Requirements Management Practices

Embrace business analysis at the speed and scale of your organization.

Analysts’ perspective

Scale Up Your Requirements Management Practices

Vince Mirabelli

Principal Research Director,
Application Delivery and Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Hans Eckman

Principal Research Director,
Application Delivery and Management
Info-Tech Research Group

History has proven the importance of requirements management in delivering value through successful projects, products, and processes. Yet we continue to make the same mistakes, ignoring or discounting the benefits of business analysis and requirements management. These disciplines continue to be under attack despite consistent research and project metrics showing the need for proper requirements management. With the continued shift to Agile DevOps practices, teams are further undermining the value of highly mature analysis, leading to BADgile (bad Agile) practices.

We no longer have time to relearn, rediscover, and redocument.

Managing requirements as an asset is more important than ever with the need to deliver solutions and changes quickly and be able to respond to opportunities or avoid danger.

Operating with an immature requirements management practice is no longer an option.

This is your time to take a stand and develop an outcome-based requirements management process and playbook aligned with your overall solution delivery framework. This becomes your vehicle to keep teams on the right path and dramatically reduce rework and missing value delivery.

Increase your odds of delivering the right value the first time, without costly rework and disappointed stakeholders. Build your highly mature requirements management practice now.

Executive summary

Insights summary

Contrary to popular belief, business analysis and requirements management are not dead. They are more important than ever in an environment of continual disruption and upheaval.

Good requirements practices are the key to unlocking project and product value and reducing technical debt.

Poor requirements are the number one reason that projects fail

• Requirements gathering and management has been an ongoing issue for IT professionals for decades. Poor requirements are the primary source of avoidable and costly rework (Info-Tech Research Group’s CIO Business Vision diagnostic, n=324), and 78% of software projects that fail do so because of poor requirements management (Geneca, 2017).

Requirements are more than elicitation and documentation

• When project teams focus solely on gathering and clarifying requirements, they become note-takers and documenters, missing the true purpose of analysis work. Getting things done isn’t as important as getting the right things done at the right time and for the right people.

Analysis isn’t just for product delivery, it is critical for product management

• A business or systems analyst must be one of a product owner’s or product manager’s best friends. Analysis is the bridge between operational (business) needs and the solution development that will unlock value. Requirements management helps ensure that the changes are “ready” for development and prioritized for the highest ROI.
• Managing requirements as an asset (as evergreen documentation in an always evolving current state) provides easier impact assessments, reduced time defining changes, and significantly less risk of requirements errors and omissions.

Requirements management reduces projects failure

78%

78% of requirements are out of sync with stakeholder goals

(Geneca, 2017)

62%

“There exists a Requirements Premium … organizations using poor practices spent 62% more on similarly sized projects than organizations using the best requirements practices.”

– Howard Podeswa, Requirements Engineering Magazine

Requirements define the solution. They must clearly articulate what is expected and serve as the blueprint for downstream activities, from development and testing to managing the adoption of change.

Getting to this point takes focus.

This is why maturing requirements management is critical to your continuous delivery and execution

“Requirements maturity is more important to project outcomes than methodology.”

– Keith Ellis, IAG Consulting

Many organizations would benefit from enhancing their business analysis maturity

The often-overlooked strategic value of the role comes with maturing your practices.

Only 18% of organizations have mature (optimized or established) business analysis practices.

With that higher level of maturity comes increased levels of capability, efficiency, and effectiveness in delivering value to people, processes, and technology. Through such efforts, teams are better equipped and able to connect the strategy of their organization to the projects, processes, and products they deliver.

Mature teams shift focus from “figuring business analysis out” to truly unleashing its potential, with business analysts contributing in strategic and tactical ways.

Source: PMI, 2017

Info-Tech Insight

Business analysts are best suited to connect the strategic with the tactical, the systems, and the operations. They maintain the most objective lens regarding how people, process, and technology connect and relate, and the most skilled of them can remove bias and politics from their perspective.

How business analysis supports our success today

Delivering value at the tactical level

Effective business analysis guides an organization through improvements to processes, products, and services. Business analysts “straddle the line between IT and the business to help bridge the gap and improve efficiency” in an organization (CIO, 2023).

They are most heavily involved in:

• Defining needs
• Modeling concepts, processes, and solutions
• Conducting analysis
• Maintaining and managing requirements
• Managing stakeholders
• Monitoring progress
• Doing business analysis planning
• Conducting elicitation

By including a business analyst in a project, organizations benefit by:

(IAG Consulting, 2009)

87%

Reducing time overruns

75%

Preventing budget overspend

78%

Reducing missed functionality

Use requirements to identify solution return on investment (ROI)

Requirements are key to product management success

Take a systems-thinking approach to solutions to ensure end-to-end value for end users aligned with the solution’s vision

• Product requirements are the building blocks for all work and value delivered by an organization, whether they know it or not.
• Think of requirements as the raw materials for your operations. Your quality is dependent on the “builder” and “building blocks.”
  • If your materials are of poor quality, your structure will be too.
  • If analysts (builders) lack the skills to use the materials effectively, your building design will underperform.
• You need both high-quality requirements and expert analysts to build an organizational foundation that is built to last.

Strong stakeholder satisfaction with requirements management results in higher satisfaction in other areas

Source: Info-Tech Research Group’s CIO Business Vision diagnostic; n=324 small organizations
High satisfaction indicates a score greater than or equal to eight out of ten, and lower satisfaction a score below eight.

What is requirements management?

Requirements management includes “[p]lanning, executing, monitoring, and controlling any or all of the work associated with requirements elicitation and collaboration, requirements analysis and design, and requirements life cycle management.”

– “Business Analysis Body of Knowledge,” IIBA, 2015

It is an end-to-end framework for ensuring;

• The right questions are asked.
• The right features are built.
• The features built maximize stakeholder value.
• Change is managed effectively.
• Knowledge is maintained for the future.

Effective requirements management brings improved outcomes

Build the right features

Define what your users need and how best to engage with the solution.

Align with strategy

Ensure that what is being built into the solution “moves the needle” on achieving the strategic objectives of the organization. Otherwise, why build it?

Prevent scope creep

Define the boundaries of what you will and won’t include in solutions. This makes it easier to push back against stakeholders asking for “just one more feature.”

Avoid barriers

Support planning so that your project or product can avoid the many pitfalls and constraints that arise.

Adapted from Asana, 2024

There is a significant price to pay for poor requirements

(And we're not just talking figuratively!)

Poor requirements can result in increased effort, rework, defects, lower trust, low value, technical debt, costly production support, and little agility.

64%

64% of defect costs could be avoided during the analysis and design phases

(Crosstalk, cited in Deloitte, 2022).

Source: PPM Express, 2022

Address the causes of poor requirements

Retrospectives must be actionable and address the causes of poor requirements management. This isn’t a product/project issue. This is an enterprise risk and constraint issue.

Root Causes of Poor Requirements Gathering:

• Requirements elicitation procedures don’t exist.
• Requirements procedures exist but aren’t followed.
• There isn't enough time allocated to the analysis phase.
• There isn't enough investment secured from stakeholders and SMEs.
• There is no senior leadership mandate to fix requirements management.

Outcomes of Poor Requirements Gathering:

• Delays, rework, and costly overruns.
• Poor deliverable quality.
• Delayed feature implementation and value realization.
• Low feature utilization.
• Low stakeholder and end-user trust and satisfaction.

Requirements are a balancing act

Collaboration

Collaborating with subject matter experts and delivery team leads is necessary to define and validate requirements. Work with their limited availability.

Communication

Stakeholders and the delivery team must be kept informed throughout the requirements lifecycle. Provide the right information to the right people at the right time.

Documentation

Recording, organizing, and validating requirements are essential and must be right-sized to avoid slowing the time to delivery.

Control

Control points establish your “Definition of Done” for the timely gathering, analysis, and validation of product requirements.

Leverage Info-Tech’s proven Requirements Gathering Framework as the basis for building requirements processes

Info-Tech’s Requirements Gathering Framework is a comprehensive approach to requirements management that can be scaled to any size of project or organization. This framework has been extensively road-tested with our clients to ensure that it balances the needs of IT and business stakeholders to give a holistic, end-to-end approach for requirements gathering. It covers the foundational issues (elicitation, analysis, and validation) and prescribes techniques for planning, monitoring, communicating, and managing the requirements gathering process.

Don’t forget the importance of training

When creating the process for requirements management, think about how it will be executed by your BAs and what the composition of your business analysis team should look like. A strong business analysis professional needs to serve as an effective facilitator, mediator, and designer, maximizing value delivered to all areas of the organization.

What are some core competencies of a good BA?

• Strong stakeholder management skills
• Strong facilitation and elicitation skills
• Ability to ask relevant probing questions to uncover the unstated needs of stakeholders
• Experience with a variety of tools, tactics, and techniques

To ensure alignment of your BAs to the requirements management process, undertake a formal skills assessment to identify areas where analysts are strong and areas that should be targeted for training and skills development.

Training your BAs on the requirements management practice is essential; you need to get them on the same page to ensure consistency and repeatability of the requirements process.

Consider implementing a mentorship program between senior and junior BAs or investing in foundational training to lay a solid foundation for or close gaps in your requirements management practice.

Info-Tech’s methodology for requirements management

Blueprint tools and templates

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Requirements Management Maturity Assessment

Helps establish your current maturity level, define your target state, and plan how to get there.

Requirements Management Workbook

Supporting tools and templates to advance your requirements management practice.

Key deliverable:

Requirements Management Playbook

A practical playbook for aligning your teams and articulating the guidelines for managing requirements within your team and organization.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Executive & Technical Counseling

“Our team and processes are maturing; however, to expedite the journey we’ll need a seasoned practitioner to coach and validate approaches, deliverables, and opportunities.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all five options.